RACHEL WOLFSON, Itinerant (Division)

“You are on a journey. Passing over Europe you make your way to Egypt, one flight, then another. You work in the Midwest and then in the Northwest, stopping along the way like a vagabond. As you move from place to place, from painting to painting, you, the viewer, become the itinerant: the wanderer.

The paintings all start with motion. It’s as if you’re looking at the places in the paintings from the window of a car, plane, or train. I like to call them “drive-bys” because they freeze scenes you might only catch for an instant as you pass by in a moving vehicle.

When I drive around in my car I prop my camera up on my shoulder to take pictures of the houses and cars I pass. I stitch the images together in the paintings in my studio. The houses, cars and trees that I paint are publicly visible from the road, but they belong to someone, which makes staring at them a bit voyeuristic.

Recreating their likeness in the studio amplifies this, but they aren’t just as they were. Colors and the alignment of objects are manipulated to echo the way time changes the way we remember things. The paintings are intimate, but not exclusive. Lacking just enough information to tell you exactly where you are or whom you’re looking at, they instead blur like a memory of one place fading into another.”